Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

And so the holiday began, though we didn’t call it that until a few months in, when Haim wanted us to watch that movie, and I didn’t really understand until a few days after Haim recovered, until I sent for the mothers (both of whom had, since we first moved to England, been clamoring to be allowed to visit together) and went to the police station to report Charlie missing. The report took a long time and the officer seemed to grow increasingly confused. He left and came back nearly an hour later with his supervisor, an older, red-faced man who patiently explained to me that their passport records showed that Charlie had left the country. He seemed sorry to have to tell me this, to have to reveal to the clueless husband his loss, and we sat there for a minute in silence. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” the man said sadly, in a way that seemed full of his disappointment at what this life had turned out to be.

We got the first video a month later. To be honest, I was not all that surprised that Charlie had fled. Some part of me knew it when I came in that morning and saw Haim in the PICU, alone, unconscious. Seeing him like that, almost comically undersized amidst all the machines and screens and even the scaled-down hospital bed, was like getting punched in the stomach. Nothing could have pulled her away from him when he was like that — no abduction, no accident — except volition. I was told at one point a nurse was on top of Haim, straddling him; she did a compression too hard and one of his ribs broke, and I often wonder if it was this single muffled snap of sound that brought Charlie out of it, that propelled her out of the building in shock, against what should have been all her instincts, and down the streets (perhaps even passing me, without either of us knowing it?) and eventually to her suitcases and the airport. I have seen the gaping maw of the world , I remember her once reciting to me when we were still in college, and am fit no longer for heaven or hell. And so I wasn’t terribly surprised when we got the video either.

The video was a short clip, about twenty seconds long. It arrived on my phone from Charlie’s email address, and I stared at it for a long time before opening it. The body of the message was blank. The attached clip was taken from a handheld video camera and shook slightly. There was the glossy square of a picture, a postcard being held up to the lens. It showed a photograph of the palace at Versailles. The camera then panned up from the postcard to the actual building itself in the distance, roughly in the same scale as the picture. There was the distant sound of someone’s laughter. When the camera panned back down, the postcard had been flipped over. On it there was writing in thick black marker. DO YOU KNOW, it said, THAT I LOVE YOU SO MUCH?

For the first few days she was gone, before I’d made the police report, I’d refused to look at our credit card charges. I believed that if I didn’t, she would come back. That the act of not looking would make it impossible, in some Schrödinger’s cat kind of way, for there to be charges from the airport, from foreign ATMs. When the police captain eventually told me the truth, that she was gone, not even in the same country, I felt that kind of magical thinking disappear from me forever. The same day the video arrived, I got a call from our bank inquiring about some suspicious charges and asking if I happened to be on a trip — I could have stopped it all right then, explained that I needed to freeze our accounts for legal reasons, settled something between us then, but I didn’t. I didn’t say anything, except to tell the man that my wife was traveling, and I wanted to be sure she had everything she needed.

Do you know, I thought, that I love you so much. What does that even mean.

Charlie would have been aware of the pithy irony of it, would have known the mixture of insult and hollow sentimentalism any man in my position would be forced to take it as, would have known all this, and sent it anyway.

Of course, I spent the days as Haim came back into life searching my memory for clues. As more clips came in especially, one every two or so weeks. There was one from a Portuguese lighthouse, the camera finding DO YOU KNOW in rickety letters of scrawled graffiti on its interior stairwell, then THAT carved into the door with a pen, then I LOVE YOU, in girly script near the base of the recreated torch light, then SO MUCH at the end of a sentence in fat black marker by the stairs, the beginning of which, I could just make out, was DRU FUCKS BITCHES. How long did she have to look, I thought when I watched it, to find all of the words in English?

“Don’t you know that I love you?” Charlie used to cry when we were younger, when we still had dramatic arguments that so exhausted us both that by the end we’d just be leaning into one another, and she’d be lightly beating my chest.

The holiday lasted all the way through the fall. As it went on I kept track of her with the credit card bill online, going back and forth between the electronic statement and Google’s satellite search function. But you can’t make a real path out of the random constellation of cashpoints, of obscure historical sites’ gift shops and train stations. At any moment while I sat there in Haim’s room late into the night, while he slept and I bent over the glow of my computer to save him from waking, Charlie could’ve been headed in any direction, could be on any train streaming through the Nordic or German or Russian or Spanish countryside, or in any room of a cut-rate left-bank flat, could be in the company of any man, any woman, any lover or friend or fan or critic of hers from the art world, but certainly not in the company of any child, certainly changing train compartments if one arrived, oblivious, in the company of a traveler. It didn’t mean anything, really, to follow her.

At the end of October I had to get one of the nurses to help me paint Haim’s face with orange, white, and black because he wanted to be a tiger. He insisted on waiting until the last second before the hospital Halloween party to put the paint on, in case “someone who really knows how to do it comes on the ward.” As the play specialists took the kids from Pediatric Oncology around trick-or-treating to the various nursing stations, I watched Charlie’s latest message. It was from the square in front of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. It was longer than usual, almost four minutes. It began with an old, hawkish woman in a long, weathered fur coat singing with an open hatbox in front of her. Her voice was high, vibrato-rich, operatic. DO YOU KNOW, she warbled shrilly, stumbling on the syllables, not looking at the camera, THAT I LOVE YOU SO MUCH?

The camera panned out to the rest of the sprawling square, which was gray and empty in the faltering autumn sun. It seemed to be afternoon, and there were hardly any tourists. The many groups of pigeons shrugged in the cold. I sat there in Haim’s empty room with the laptop on my lap and watched the clip again and again, eventually closing my eyes and listening to the long stretch after the woman stops singing, the digital roar of the wind gusting against the camera, thinking of the camera’s closeness to Charlie’s face and trying to hear, in the long space of ambient noise and quiet, the sound of her breathing. I had to stop when Haim wheeled himself back in, crying. His chewing ability had been gradually deteriorating and finally, in one of his first denials, it meant that he couldn’t have any of the Tootsie Rolls he had been given.

By Thanksgiving, when Charlie did not show up, I decided to let Haim watch the videos. Because I didn’t know how much longer we’d be allowed to leave the hospital, Haim and I went to his favorite restaurant, a tacky Italian chain imported from America. I told him about the videos, and asked if he wanted to see them. He thought about it for a minute, poking at his chicken parmigiana, and then said that he’d like to watch them. When we got back, Haim was already very tired but we set up the projector anyway, and he held it on his stomach, watching the string of clips silently several times through, until he was asleep.